This, That and a Movie Review of ‘The Post’

This past month I recorded a lot of thoughts rolling around in my head on topics I probably should have kept to myself. The Bachelor? Oprah? Who really cares about how I feel about pop culture and celebrities besides me and often times I wonder about my own level of interest in what goes on in between my ears. It’s called ‘editing’ Jean. I know how to do that when I’m face to face with others but I could use a refresher course in editing my thoughts when I write. If you rooted out an apology in this paragraph, au contraire. I'm just saying that a self-imposed commitment to write a 1,000 words twice a week might be good disciple and a useful teaching tool for would-be writers but there's a fine line between forcing a topic and finding one. Sometimes I forget that.

The January thaw has brought my social life back into the realm of possibilities which is always good for journaling fodder. This week’s choice: Should I go to the rescheduled-for-the-3^rd-time Red Hat Society Christmas party or go on an outing with my Movie and Lunch Club? I chose the latter because I was totally out of the mood to stretch the holidays out past the middle of January. From the photos they shared online, I was the only one who didn’t make it and I didn’t feel even a tinge of regret looking at all those smiling ladies all decked out in their gaudy best. Ever since they changed “management” over a year ago, I’ve lost interest in the group. One power-drugged person---even a nice, church lady power-drugged person---can change the whole dynamics of a group. Dictatorships, whether in a group of twenty or in a country, creates the dissident class. That’s me, Ms Dissident.

I skipped the ‘lunch’ part of my Movie and Lunch Club because I still felt a little weak from being sick not long ago and I didn’t want to over-tax myself with a stretched-out social afternoon. The movie we saw was The Post with Tom Hawks and Meryl Streep taking the lead parts and directed by Steven Spielberg. You can’t go wrong with that combination of talent at the helm. Rotten Tomatoes.com sums up the story like this: It’s “…a thrilling drama about the unlikely partnership between The Washington Post's Katharine Graham (Streep), the first female publisher of a major American newspaper, and editor Ben Bradlee (Hanks), as they race to catch up with The New York Times to expose a massive cover-up of government secrets that spanned three decades and four U.S. Presidents. The two must overcome their differences as they risk their careers - and their very freedom - to help bring long-buried truths to light.” 

For anyone who lived through that era when the Pentagon Papers were exposed and The Times and The Post ended up in an emergency Supreme Court hearing charged with treason via a suit filed by the Nixon administration, for any history buff or political junkie, for anyone concerned about our present administration’s attack on the press this is a MUST-SEE film! All the glowing reviews this movie has gotten are well deserved. But I wish more younger people were interested in see it. My niece saw it on a Friday night and she noted the same thing I did about my afternoon audience. We were all older, well dressed people who looked college educated or at least smart enough to follow the complicated and fast-moving true story and the importance of the Fourth Estate in our democracy. 

Near the end of the movie they quoted Justice Hugo Black’s argument for ruling in favor of the two newspaper’s right to publish the then-classified Pentagon Papers and against Nixon’s attempt to control the press and I was able to google his words. They’re important words, words that matter today every bit as much as they did in 1971 when the court ruled 6 to 3. He wrote, “In the First Amendment the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people.” 

And that’s why Trump’s attempt to erode the credibility of the press is so dangerous. It’s why we need to remain vigilant against his corrosive, dictatorship-inspired tactic of calling any news he doesn’t like “fake” news. It’s why we all need to put on our dissidents hats and stand up for this basic building block of our democracy. ©

 This is probably the most comprehensive movie trailer I’ve seen in ages. The 2:32 minutes sums up the two hour movie and the historical event it covers with near perfection.   

A fun and fascinating interview of Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep on CBS This Morning about the movie. 

“Katharine Graham stepped into a moment in history where she made history.” Meryl Streep

“The news is the first rough draft of history.”

A line attributed to Katharine Graham in the movie, who was quoting her father.